A Train to Moscow(27)
She stands at the streetcar stop when Andrei appears in the opening door, ready to get off. He freezes when he sees her. A wiry woman pushes him in the back with a string bag full of turnips, but he doesn’t move. He doesn’t seem to notice the impatient passenger behind him. All he sees is Sasha, her face naked in its trust, open to him and no one else.
He steps forward and embraces her. For a moment, Sasha doesn’t know what to do with her arms, but then they rise and wrap themselves around him. The two of them stand like this, buried in each other, for how long she doesn’t know. Inside her, the love for Andrei pulsates with such intensity that it nearly burns, catapulting her back to the memory of a ball of lightning she saw when she was six.
She remembers she was at the river with Grandma, rinsing a load of laundry, when a thunderstorm came out of nowhere, and they hid in a shack where someone, long dead, had kept his rowboat, now all crumbly and rotten through, a dark skeleton from old times. They stood inside the shack and waited for the storm to end as a ball of lightning heaved through an empty window cut out of the wall but never enclosed with glass. Afraid to move, she looked at Grandma, her frozen profile, her stiff vertebrae, the corner of her petrified eye. The ball of lightning sailed across the room and lingered over the boat, sighing and glowing, like an enormous egg yolk suspended in the air. They flattened themselves into the splintery wood of the wall, afraid to stir, watching it crackle with electricity. Then the ball of fire dipped, almost touching the bottom of the boat; heaved its glowing mass to the windowsill, as if it had seen enough of what it came to see; and rolled out.
Sasha still remembers the feeling of overwhelming powerlessness, of being at the mercy of that fireball, of knowing what would have happened had it decided to veer a few centimeters off its path. She still holds in her bones the feeling of being paralyzed by the lightning’s lethal intensity, of being held captive, just as she is now, in Andrei’s embrace.
When they separate, Andrei holds her at arm’s length and peers into her face.
“Where have you been?” she asks.
“Staying at my boss’s house until I can get back on my feet.” He pauses, as if unsure whether he should say anything else.
“I didn’t know where to look for you,” she says. “There was no one I could ask.” She notices that his features have hardened, marks of grief gouged into his face, making him look several years older.
“Let’s get out of here.” He points to the street where they met after her piano lessons.
They walk past the neighbors’ houses, past the lilacs struggling to escape from behind the fences.
“Why are you staying with your boss?” she asks.
For a moment, he is silent, as though thinking about how much he should reveal.
“I don’t know why Vadim has been so good to me. He feeds me; he shares his home with me. He talks to me and promises me a good future.” Andrei stops but then decides to continue. “We drink vodka at night after work. Just the two men, hozyaeva, as Vadim calls us, the masters. The masters of his apartment, of Ivanovo, and, by the time the bottle is empty, the masters of the entire world. The masters who will soon build this glorious dream, he says, an idea so grand that it will make our skin crawl.”
He pauses as they walk past a house with two babkas on the bench, whispering. “I’m not a master of anything yet,” he says, “but the glorious dream and the shining future—what Vadim promises—sound good to me. Wouldn’t you want to live in the shining future? Not like my father, who only lived in the rotten past.”
Sasha feels odd jealousy rising inside her, a jealousy toward Andrei’s boss she has never met, the person who has been next to him after the fire, soothing his grief with vodka, helping him heal. This is something she should have done, without the vodka part. All she can give Andrei now, it seems, is sympathy.
“I am so sorry about your mother,” she says. “And your father. You must feel so much pain . . . I’m terribly sorry.”
“Don’t feel sorry for my father.” Andrei’s face suddenly cringes with hatred. “He didn’t deserve your sympathy. He was a drunk and a criminal, and I wish he’d stayed in the camps where he belonged. I wish he’d never come back.” They turn onto a footpath leading to the river, and as they walk on the hardened dirt, the expanse of still water opens before their eyes. “All my father ever did was spout stories about his time in the camps, about the savagery and atrocities, stories I never believed even for a moment.”
Andrei falls silent. She watches his jaw tense as he swipes his hair off his forehead. They are now standing at the bank of the Uvod’ River, over the little beach carved by the water from the thicket of reeds and tall grass.
“Do you want to hear any of this?” he asks. “It’s gruesome, like some of your uncle’s war journal.”
Sasha nods. She is not sure she wants to hear it, but she knows Andrei is entrusting her with something he won’t share with anyone else. Probably not even with his boss. This may be Andrei’s response, she thinks, to her entrusting him with Kolya’s journal.
They sit down on the grass and stare into the water, black from peat.
“My father came back from the camps with no teeth and no forgiveness. He boiled with hate, and he unleashed that hate on us, but mostly on my mother. It was as if it were her fault that a quarter of his life had been stolen from him, as if she didn’t try hard enough to glue together the pieces of the wreck he had become. He said he told me those stories to teach me a life lesson. There is no friendship in the camps, he said. It’s always you against them. As if I needed a lesson from a thug. As if I was going to end up behind barbed wire, like him.”